


Exiles of the Sunless Sea

by greerwatson



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Worldbuilding, Worldbuilding: Bism society (Narnia) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 13:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10515132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: The Bismian perspective on the events ofThe Silver Chair.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



When the Witch took Wyrmish form and slithered down a shaft in the rock to escape the people of the Sunless Sea, she found another Realm, one whose existence had hitherto remained unsuspected.  She never explored the Deepest Lands further than her magic could protect her; but, if she had ventured down the flaming river, she would have found that it traversed a level of the world that spread every inch as far as the Realms of Sky, or Overland, or Undersea.  She was a learned Witch in her own way, and came to the conclusion that it had to be a fourth Realm, one ruled by the elements of Fire and Earth, as the sunken city she had fled was ruled by Earth and Water.  Above both Realms, on the skin of all that was familiar, lay the surface kingdoms ruled by Water and Air: they had their own seas, but these lay open to the Sky. As for Sky (of which she had only theoretical knowledge), it was, of course, ruled by Air and Fire.  Once, she had ventured along a passage heading upwards, writhed over a land of grass and flowers, looked up appalled at the Starfolk in their eternal dance, and … fled.  That had been centuries ago:  she was stronger now in her power, and angry.  She would conquer and rule.

In the alien deeps, she broke the Earthmen to obedience, and found the means to work her vengeance.

 

* * *

 

 _In the beginning was the Song…_.

The story of the creation of Narnia is as familiar to those who dwell in Bism as it is to anyone else, though the version that Golg learned as a pebbling differed in most of its details from that taught elsewhere.  Still, the essentials remained.  Aslan was in it, as was his command to Narnia to live, for it was in that moment that the first Earthman stepped from the living rock of the Deepest Depths.

Sometimes in its dreams Golg itself was among those who made that fatal step, shaping hands and eyes and body to follow the tune.  Of course, those dreams came only after the Wyrm came to Bism and wrought the terrible magic of enslavement.  Before that, there was no need for Earthmen to dream of freedom.  They knew the ways of rock and stone, how to dig and how to shape.  They raised the living lodes till they branched far above Bism, and nurtured the growing crystals of gems till they were ripe for harvest.

Sometimes Golg dreamt of home—of sailing a dragonskin boat on a river of fire with salamanders raising their brilliant heads from the flames to pass yarns of days of yore; of days-long festival, wild dances through the streets of Bathis, and the joy of fireworks; of the hot sweet taste of living gold, the tang of sulphur, and the crunch of granite.  Whatever it dreamt, all was forgotten in the moment of waking.  There were no living jewels or salamanders in the Shallow Lands.  It was a cold, dank realm.  All gnomes forgot heat as they woke.  Indeed, they lost all memory of the Time Before the Wyrm.  When they told themselves tales of the glories of Bism, they fuddled them into fantasies; and those they dismissed as tales of forbidden imagination.  During their waking time they lived in misery and obedience.  Freedom they knew only when they slept.

Curiously, despite the magic that enthralled them, there was one thing that all the Earthmen knew:  the Great City ruled by the Wyrm was not _their_ city.  They were not native to the Shallow Lands:  this they knew, even though they could not recall where they did belong.  For one thing, they remembered their arrival….

 

_Behind them lay a forgotten path, ahead a wet and alien sea that glimmered under the cold magic light of the Wyrm’s magic.  The waters ebbed to reveal a city of carved caverns and towers built of dead stone.  Out and away the streams ran between the rocks, seemingly without end.  Golg gawped at the sight.  Then the Wyrm stretched and tortured itself out of shape.  Emerald scales paled to skin, and flesh parted to form limbs._

_There are many races of gnome in their forgotten Deeps, and Golg had travelled far; but it had never seen such a thing._

_The Wyrm stood tall above them in its new form, and bade them call it Queen._

 

When the Witch banished the Sunless Sea, she vanquished its people.  Whether those who had first built the City all perished or simply fled, the Earthmen did not at first know; but, from the filth, they could tell that the city had once been completely under the Sea.  Now it stood upon a shore, deserted.  Though they searched, they found no native inhabitants to challenge them as they cleaned out the silt and dying water-beasts, and settled into those dwellings that they considered most habitable (by their own standards, that is, for the Queen in her palace would have considered anything less magnificent to be a mere hovel).

There was no food that they recognized.  In despair, they scoured slime from the rocks and found it disgustingly edible.  In time, they learned to fish, though they found it strange fare.  With magic, the Queen created banquets from their scroungings; she furnished her palace and lived in magnificence.

In time, life in the Shallow Lands became familiar.  Gnomish skill laid pavement and built piers; sorcery set just sufficient lights about the streets for them to see by.  Then the Queen bade the Earthmen keep her lands safe from incursion, and gave them weapons.  In doing so, she knew that she was safe from rebellion, for her magic was too strong to permit even the idea to occur to them.  Obedient to her will, they ventured forth in forays of exploration in order that they might better know the caverns that she ruled.

 

 _Once upon a time, Golg had sailed down the Flumenflam and stood upon the shore of the Mare Igneum.  It had, of course, been no more than one of many in the crew aboard the great dragonskin boat_ Drimtod _. Their captain was the hero Mullugutherum (who later became the Warden of the Marches).  It was a mighty voyage through many strange and marvellous caverns.  Salamanders carried word back of their adventures; but no one believed them—salamanders being what they are. They returned years later, after all had given them up for lost._

 _This happened long before the coming of the Wyrm.  After they were freed by the foreign Prince and returned to Bism, Mullugutherum always averred that, had the Witch fought fairly, it could have beaten her itself (though not with one of those curious three-pronged spears with which she’d armed them). Golg kept its thoughts private, for it doesn’t do to contradict one’s old captain.  But one can hardly expect a Witch to go trident to chisel in single combat, not when she can win with a single word of dire enchantment.  When all’s said and done, that sort_ don’t _fight fair._

 

It was others who fashioned the shape of the boat; but Golg was among the crew. The vessel was carved from stone, there being no dragons to hunt for their fire-proof hide (and there was, of course, no need in the Shallow Lands for protection from the fiery Flumenflam). Well hollowed and thin-walled, it floated well enough. They did not have sails of dragonwing; and, in any case, there was no wind.  Instead, they fashioned oars.  These were heavy; but Earthmen deal well with rock, even when it is only dead stone.

The ship was given no name.  Those who made and crewed it were the Queen’s slaves; and it was hers to name, had it occurred to her, which it did not.  They launched it from one of the new piers, set one of the globes of cold light at the prow, and rowed away from the City into the unknown void.  The lantern’s thin glow showed only smooth black water ahead.  Behind, the lights of the City receded, ever smaller and fainter until they disappeared.

In years to come, more ships would be fashioned.  The Earthmen would explore along the coast of the Sunless Sea and find that, in the further reaches of its waters, there lived people who had fled the Witch’s magic.  These had legends of the City, which had once been their own; but the Earthmen didn’t listen to such tales.  Wherever they went, raiding among the exiles or trading with free kingdoms even further downSea, they did the bidding of their Queen.

It would have disheartened them, had they hearts.  But gnomes are of rock; and she carved them to her will.

The Queen particularly set her slaves to guard her lands against incursion from above.  This was not a direction from which the Earthmen initially saw any danger.  Still, as she bade, they ventured up the tunnels that riddled the miles of rock above the Sunless Sea.  Here they found lesser caverns, whose heights were spangled with phosphorescence, so that they were able to dowse their lanterns for a while. The upward route led them through a long narrow cave with a great sleeping giant at which they marvelled.  (Later, the new-dubbed Warden informed them that it was a ‘Father Time’.  Perhaps the Queen had told it; for before that day none of the Earthmen had ever heard of the race called ‘giants’, let alone learned the names of any of that people.)  Less strange to them was the great mossy cavern where the dragons slept.  Of all living creatures, only dragons belong to all four elements and thus are found in all Realms. They fly down deep volcanic rifts and bathe in the great underground rivers of fire, to the terror of the salamanders and gnomes.  So all the Earthmen recognized what slept in that great cavern, though it occurred to none of them to question _how_ they might have such knowledge.

It took long years before they stopped creeping silently round the edge of that cave, lest they wake the great sleeping reptiles.

At first, they did not understand why the Queen set them as guards.  However, in time they realized that her commands had reason, for occasionally, in the upper levels of the ‘Deep Realm’ (as she called it), the Earthmen did come across intruders.  These claimed to have mysteriously fallen into the caves from somewhere above.  ‘Overland’, said the Warden later, and told them it was the name of an alien realm to which these smaller tunnels that they guarded were the Marches.  So, whenever they encountered them, the Earthmen took such intruders prisoner and led them through the maze of tunnels, past the sleeping dragons and giant, back across the Sunless Sea to the City.  As Warden of the Marches, it was Mullugutherum who had the duty of taking the strays to the palace.  What he saw of their fate he never said.  As far as Golg knew, they were imprisoned at the Queen’s pleasure.  Certainly, no Overlander ever made the return journey.

Eventually, all the Earthmen came to know that, beyond the cracks in the earth through which the Overlanders fell, there was a strange and terrifying place where creatures crawled upon the surface of the world.  At first, no one could believe the rumours that the Queen herself sometimes ventured up, through one or another cave mouth, to walk (or slither in her Wyrm form) in unbounded Air with no roof above her head.  Still, it was true that she did sometimes leave the City, alone without guards.  Of that, there was no doubt, though she told no one when she left, nor did anyone know where she went.

One day, she returned with a prisoner of her own.  This, she said, was a Prince.

As Golg did not work in the Palace, it had nothing to do with the Prince in the usual way of things.  However, all who lived in the City saw him often enough, encased in metal, riding through the city on an alien beast as black as the Sea.  Usually, the Queen was with him, riding on her own beast, though one as white as the purest quartz.  Neither she nor her minion spoke with Earthmen, save to give orders.

The Queen’s invasion plans were never formally announced.  Somehow, though, there came a day when all the Earthmen knew her intentions.  (No doubt, this was through the same magic that bound them to obey her in all things.)  Work-gangs were pressed into a new service.  Those who remained in the City knew, with a terror they dared not speak, that—far downSea—miners cut deeply through the dead rock, enlarging narrow tunnels into a great, cavernous highway that led up and up, and up again, closer and closer to the surface, and further and further south.

Golg was taken from its usual labour, and trained with others into an army.  It was issued a three-pronged spear and assigned to one of many sacks that had been stuffed with weed and gravel.  Forward at full armslength, it thrust the weapon.  And the sack squished and fell.

Digging proceeded slowly, for the Queen wished a road wide enough for an army whose size would overwhelm the surface-dwellers.  Nevertheless, slow though the work was, inexorably the tunnel continued to lengthen.  For this there was no help, since none of the gnomes could even imagine disobedience, and so they _must_ dig.  Eventually, therefore, the road would reach the surface.  In the name of the Queen, they would break through to Overland.  The Prince would lead them out into naked, unimaginable emptiness.  And they would march into madness.

 

_On the day that a party of several Overlanders were taken to the palace, it seemed to the Earthmen no more than a minor incident in an otherwise routine patrol._

_Then a great chasm opened.  And they remembered._

 

It was with joy that Golg left the Prince and the other Overlanders to find their way along the tunnel to their own Realm.  If they did not wish to travel to Bism, that was their loss.  The closing of the great rift would not, though, be _its_ loss, nor that of any other Earthman.  Those who had not yet begun to climb flung themselves over the edge, trusting to the force of the hot winds rising from below to break their fall.  So they landed in their own dear forests and fields, and—to no small relief—saw the rift close above them with finality.  By the light of the Flumenflam they rejoiced and danced; and then they made their way home to Bathis.  There they scared out the skitterings and rock-lizards, dusted until all was clean and fresh, and settled back to normal life.

Still, they did not forget.  Each year thereafter, they feasted and set off fireworks to commemorate the anniversary of their deliverance.  Nor did they fail in their duty to warn the other peoples of the Deepest Realm of the danger of Wyrms and Witches.  Mullugutherum gathered many from the old crew; and, armed with rockets, they hunted among the smaller dragons until they had a fresh hide from which to fashion the _Drimtod II_.  Golg was not among the hunters; but it saw them—and several well-grown pebblings to fill up the numbers—set sail from the piers of Bathis.  Thus the story spread along all the windings of the flaming river, even unto the Mare Igneum, until everyone knew the story and was warned.  Meanwhile, back in Bathis, those who had actually been captive made sure to teach the new pebblings all the details of their days of slavery.

This was in the early years after the Return from the Shallow Lands.  Over time, the survivors inevitably grew fewer in number.  Golg regretted the passage of time, and not simply because it had fewer old mates with whom to nibble quartz and quaff diamond-juice.  Its skin might now be crazed; but it was not cracked.  Soon there would be no one left from the thousands of slaves who had rowed the Sunless Sea and dug the road to Overland.  It feared that, one day, true history might come to seem no more than salamander tales, garbled by pebblings to scare one another.

 

* * *

 

Once there were great and powerful Witches in the North.  Where they come from is unknown; but their magic is terrible. Tales are told of those witches, as they are of wyrms.  As they are of lions, come to that.  (None of these species has ever been seen by anyone alive today in Bism.  That does not mean they are myth.)

In the beginning, so they say, the world began in Song.  All know that tale, too; but most do not consider it history, not like the history that is written in books.  (More rightly, of course, they should see it as history that _is_ story, the truest sort of story.) 

Those who have read the Chronicles of Narnia know its days were numbered.  Even so, there were centuries yet to come between the time of King Rilian and the last king, Tirian.  By that time, perhaps Golg was proved right in its fear that history turn legend.  Still, whatever—whoever—may some day attempt to lure them from their home in the Deepest Depths, all gnomes know (even from their pebbling days, they know) those terrible old tales that salamanders love.  And gnomes have long lives before they crumble to dust.

When, some time in the future, the Last Trump shall sound, you may be certain that Earthmen will never venture Up again.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. In _The Silver Chair_ , C. S. Lewis employs the pronoun "it" when referring to unspecified individual Earthmen. It is true that "he/him" is used for Golg and the Warden once Jill and Eustace have come to think of them as people; but that is very much a human perspective on gender.
> 
> 2\. At the end of _The Last Battle_ , when Father Time winds his horn, there is a list of those who come through the door. After the stars, there are "all kinds of creatures - Talking Beasts, Dwarfs, Satyrs, Fauns, Giants, Calormenes, men from Archenland, Monopods, and strange unearthly things from the remote islands or the unknown Western lands." All look on Aslan and are "sorted": some disappear into his shadow, while the others continue "farther up and farther in".
> 
> Curiously, Lewis omits from his list any mention of the people of Bism. (Nor, for that matter, does he refer to them as Earthmen, or gnomes, or creatures from the Deepest Depths or the farthest North.) He doesn't include salamanders, either.
> 
> Draw your own conclusions.


End file.
